In the Language of Love

by Diane Schoemperlen

  “You think too much,” Esther said. Joanna was in the living room, in the middle of a long hot Sunday afternoon, weighed down by the heat, her family, this little house, the curtains closed against the sunlight all up and down the empty street. All of it kept pressing down upon her until she thought she would scream with the airtight seriousness of Sunday. “You think too much for your own good,” Esther said, standing in the archway between the living room and the kitchen with a dishtowel in her hand. She could not bear to see anybody doing nothing. Thinking should not be considered an activity in its own right. Rather, it was something you should do while doing something else, something more practical, more reasonable, more important.

  “Still waters run deep,” Clarence said, coming in from the front yard where he’d been out moving the sprinkler around so it would hit the begonias ranged in clay pots up and down the steps.

  “One of these days she’ll drown herself,” Esther said, as if Joanna had suddenly left the room or gone deaf.

  On weekend nights Joanna and Henry went downtown to the Neapolitan Bar and Grill to party with their friends. The Neapolitanwas the usual meeting place, filled every night with the same faces, regulars who seldom seriously considered going elsewhere. It was the kind of place where you could go any time and always find someone to sit with. The bartender, Jake, knew everyone and also what each person liked to drink and he would ask you what was the matter if you ordered something different.

  The Neapolitan was not the kind of place strangers would often come into. Outside it was run-down, dingy, and somewhat lopsided, as the foundations settled unevenly year after year into the soft earth. Over those years the stucco had been every colour imaginable and was now a generic beige, shadowed in spots with the previous green, blue, and pumpkin colours beneath.

  Inside it was also run-down and dingy, dark even in the daytime, smoky, crowded, and noisy with the music from the jukebox and the clatter of pool balls from the two tables at the back. The small round tables were set close together and covered with terry cloth to sop up the spilled drinks. The grill was a hole in the wall in the back corner where they slapped together hamburgers, french fries, and burritos. Jake stocked only standard liquors, nothing fancy, no liqueurs (except peppermint schnapps for hangovers), no imported beer, two cheap Canadian wines, a red and a white, and he didn’t do cocktails.

  The truth was Joanna would never have ventured into the Neapolitan either if it hadn’t been for the music. The last weekend of every month there was a live band. She’d gone in originally to hear the Blue Notes, a local band everybody was raving about, which was how she’d met Henry in the first place. He played bass in the band. They were not an especially good band but they were energetic and enthusiastic.

  She’d gone in with three women friends from work (she was a temporary secretary for a real estate company just then) and they’d been lucky enough to get a table near the front. She’d fallen in love with the way Henry held his guitar. Or the way his eyes shone in the half-darkened smoky room. Or the way he didn’t seem to care that he couldn’t sing very well. She had fallen in love with something about him, something specific that afterwards she could never put her finger on. But later, every time she saw him up on stage, the feeling came back and her heart jumped up.

  At the end of that first night Henry had come and sat down with them, introduced himself, ordered a round, and sang (off-key, quietly) into Joanna’s left ear that Kenny Rogers song, “Don’t Fall in Love with a Dreamer.” When he wasn’t playing his guitar, he said, he was driving a dump truck for a local construction company. Two months later they were living together. It was all so easy, no wonder she couldn’t remember later exactly how it had happened. Later, when people asked them how they’d met, Henry said, “She picked me up in a bar,” and Joanna said, “I did.” She remained surprised to find herself living with a dump-truck driver named Henry. Not that there was anything intrinsically wrong with either of these things, the trade or the name. It was just that she had never thought to picture herself in this position.

  Now it was Friday night and another band was playing as fast and as loud as they could. Everyone was dancing and singing and drinking to excess. Around ten o’clock two strangers came in. The woman had big hair dyed brassy red, a black leather jacket, red lipstick, blue mascara, earrings that looked like knives. The man was short and slim with round shoulders, glasses, a moustache, average. They found a small table near where Joanna and Henry were sitting with their friends.

  They were Henry’s friends really, other men with long hair and shaggy beards like Henry, other musicians and dump-truck drivers, a carpenter, a roofer, a plumber. Often Joanna was the only woman in the group. Occasionally one of the other men had a date, but not often and never the same woman twice. They were divorced or they were confirmed bachelors. They referred to themselves as “the boys.” Joanna knew they liked her well enough, for a woman. She was a good sport, for a woman. She never complained about the bad language, the interminable arguments about unions, the odour of diesel fuel which hung in the air all around them. Whenever Pete the roofer got really drunk and stood on the table to do his glass-eating trick, she laughed as loudly as the rest of them. Whenever Luke the carpenter did his straw trick (he could stick a small plastic drinking straw all the way up his left nostril and then make it come out his mouth), she applauded as wildly as the rest of them. She was hardlysqueamish at all, for a woman. She did not tell them they were gruesome or gross.

  But Joanna was feeling restless and bored with Henry and his friends. She had been hoping for two months now that Henry would change, because if he didn’t, she thought she was going to have to break up with him. They had been together for nearly two years. She wanted him to be neater, cleaner, more creative, more ambitious. She wanted him to drink less and read more, sleep less and exercise more, party less and help out around the house more, watch less TV and eat more vegetables. Much of what she had found charming and refreshing about him at the outset of their relationship now bugged the hell out of her. She wanted him to grow up, settle down, and find another group of friends.

  In fact Henry had changed. He had trimmed his beard, cleaned the oven, stopped putting four teaspoons of sugar in his coffee, started lifting weights and watching PBS. He had stopped dragging this annoying bunch of losers home with him at all hours of the day or night. He was reading Madame Bovary because she had said it was a great book. He was trying to understand her art. At least once a day now he asked her how it was going, and last week he had even suggested they go to see the new show at the Gallery Nouvelle. But when the day came he had an abscessed tooth, which was hardly his fault, but Joanna was angry anyway and so she went alone. After the show she went down to the Neapolitan because she was mad and she wasn’t there for ten minutes before Jake the bartender called her to the phone. It was Henry, who said he felt so miserable, would she please come home and make him some chicken soup? She told him there was a can of chicken noodle in the cupboard.

  He had said at least twice recently that maybe he didn’t want to be a truck driver all his life after all. So yes, he was trying to change. But what if he did change and she still wasn’t happy with him?

  He knew she was unhappy. She wasn’t exactly hiding her feelings. But they hadn’t yet seriously acknowledged the inevitability of breaking up. Henry, she thought, was still trying to jolly her out of it. Yesterday he had given her a funny card for no reason: Don’t worry! One of these days we’ll see the light at the end of the tunnel…and with our luck it’ll be an oncoming train!

  Now Henry was asking her to dance, but she said she was too hot, too thirsty, she thought she’d just sit and sip on her beer. Really she was eavesdropping on the strangers at the next table. Clearly, they were not getting along. The redhead was leaning across the table towards the man and her mouth was getting thinner and harder. He stared more deeply into his glass as she berated him. When the band paused between songs, Joanna heard the words “asshole,” “fuck f
ace,” “bastard,” “how could you?” And several times a name which the woman spat out with such vehemence that Joanna could not be sure if it was Lonny, Bonnie, or Connie. Then the man was mumbling into his moustache at some length. Neither of them noticed that Joanna was listening.

  Suddenly the redhead cried, “Deep? You want deep? I’ll show you deep!” In what seemed to be a single movement, she jumped to her feet, smashed the glass ashtray in half against the side of the table and dragged it down the full length of his face. Then she ran out the door as the man put his hands over his face and the blood flowed through his fingers.

  As Joanna watched the man bleeding and half the bar running towards him and Jake behind the bar picking up the phone to call the police, she made the single sound “O,” deflated, defeated, unfinished, her lips still wet from her last sip of beer staying that shape for a long time after the sound was out. Then she was pounding Henry on the arm and crying, “Do something! Do something!”

  He said, quietly, “What?”

  Joanna was having a show of her new collages at the Gallery Nouvelle. She was nervous and excited. About a variety of things. Mostly about the show, of course. But also about Lewis with whom she had been sleeping for seven months. He was coming tonight to the show with Wanda. Joanna had been torn up for two weeks about it, hating herself for having come to the point where being in the same room with Lewis and Wanda was better than not being with him at all.

  “Tell her not to come,” she had pleaded repeatedly.

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “You know.”

  “I know.”

  All their other artist friends would be there too, to be supportive and to avail themselves of the free wine and food. There would also be a number of prominent community professionals who might actually buy something. Certainly none of the other artists could afford to.

  Just before eight o’clock the guests began to arrive in groups of two or three. Lewis and Wanda appeared at quarter after eight. Joanna, having endured several other similar situations during the past seven months, had perfected her technique of remaining in motion around the room, chatting with one cluster of guests, then moving graciously on to the next, hugging old friends, introducing herself politely to new faces, all of this without ever losing track of Lewis (and Wanda) but without yet having to speak to him (them) directly. That encounter was best postponed until she had screwed up her confidence, had a bit too much wine, and could enter fully into the spirit of the masquerade.

  Sometimes she lurked beside the hors d’oeuvres table and helped herself to the free wine. Sometimes she stood quietly behind clumps of strangers as they examined her work. Most people were impressed and paid her compliments. But some people said, “I think it must be upside-down.” “What is that green blob in the corner?” “What’s her name again?” She knew she should not be listening to them. It was foolish, unprofessional, and faintly masochistic. It was like a scab you could not keep yourself from picking till it bled.

  A fat pale man in a beige suit peered for a long time at a piece she had called Time Zones. The base of the collage was a large antique map of the world upon which Joanna had pasted photographs of various objects stereotypically indigenous to certain areas: tulips on the Netherlands, penguins on Antarctica, oil wells and camels on the Middle East, cars, dollar bills, stereos, and hand guns across most of North America. She had also pasted, on the oceans and seas, many pictures of clock and watch faces and parts of actual watch mechanisms: tiny gears and springs, small and large clock hands sprouting from the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Red Sea, the Dead Sea, the Suez Canal.

  The woman with the fat pale man was also fat and pale, wearing a blue silk dress. They both looked a little glazed, having stared at Time Zones for so long. Finally the man grunted and said, “I don’t get it.” Joanna had thought Time Zones was obvious, maybe too obvious in its thematic implications.

  The woman said, “Well, you know, it’s this modern art. It’s like this new math. Why do they keep changing everything? Why can’t they just leave well enough alone? This modern art, it’s not supposed to mean anything. It’s not even supposed to be anything really. You’re not supposed to know what you’re looking at. It’s deep. It’s like this modern poetry. It doesn’t rhyme. I’ve always liked rhymes. And I’d sooner have a nice landscape, trees and water, sun and some horses, maybe birds, over my new chesterfield.”

  Joanna saw in her head the picture which had hung over her parents’ chesterfield when she was a child. White horses whipped into a frenzy beneath a stormy overwrought deep blue sky behind, the lead stallion about to rear up with his nostrils flared and his long mane flying in the cruel blue wind.

  “Yes,” the man said, shaking his head. “Yes, you’re right. It’s too deep for me.”

  Joanna looked down at their feet as they made their way to the door. Instinctively she scanned the room for Lewis, looking for moral support. Just as she spotted him near the Exit sign, he leaned down to whisper in Wanda’s ear. He put his large hand around her small shoulder. She pressed her palm against his chest. They were smiling, nearly hugging. Joanna’s stomach clenched and sliced open, hard and hot, as if she’d swallowed a chunk of her wineglass.

  For the first time in years she remembered the redhead and the ashtray in the Neapolitan. Deep? she thought. You want deep? I’ll show you deep! She wondered how it had felt to slash open that man’s face, that small average mumbling man, that fat pale stupid man, that tall handsome man over there being so nice to his wife.

  She wished she knew what jail that redheaded woman was in. Maybe she wasn’t in jail at all. Maybe she had gotten away with it. Maybe she was just going on with her life like everyone else, eating cheese, drinking wine, going to art galleries (probably not), going toseedy bars then, drinking draft beer and dancing, or maybe she had been completely changed by the ashtray incident. Maybe she was a social worker now, or a probation officer, maybe she was a kindergarten teacher or maybe she had married that small average mumbling man, his face far more interesting now with the scar, maybe she was the mother of twins, changing diapers, baking cookies, spending whole afternoons in the park in the sun while the babies slept in their stroller in the shade beside the swings. Maybe her hair wasn’t even red any more, maybe she had let it grow back to its original mousy brown.

  The ashtray slashing that night was the most drastic and dramatic thing Joanna had ever seen in her whole life and, like all the other true deep dramas, it hadn’t even made the newspaper. She remembered searching for it the next day in the evening after supper, sitting on the couch beside Henry, and even though she was rattling the pages all around him, he didn’t ask what she was looking for. Instead he asked if she wanted to go down to the Neapolitan. She said no. They stayed home and watched TV instead, an old movie which she could not remember the name of now but it was one of those sinking-ship movies where they’re launching the lifeboats and, try as they might, there is never enough room for everyone and so the captain (a distinguished rotund grey-haired man looking snappy, heroic, and efficient in his tidy white uniform) plants his feet firmly in the middle of the panic and yells, “Women and children first!” There was a good reason for this hierarchy of rescue but Joanna could never be sure what it was. They had watched the movie and gone to bed. She could not remember if they made love. Probably not, because she was busy thinking that yes, it was quite possible that even if someone did change in all the ways you thought you wanted him to, you still might not be happy with him. Yes, it was quite possible to love someone and then stop.

  But now she loved Lewis and she could not stop.

  At home alone later after the show she tried to cry but couldn’t. She hated crying. It made her feel ridiculous, the tears and the snot got smeared all over her face, and she sounded, as Esther had once pointed out, like a sick moose. She could not cry the way they did in those old movies, gently, softly, sweetly, warm tears sliding down apretty face, wounded eyes growing wi
der and wider…darker and darker…fade to black in the arms of a handsome, sympathetic, well-dressed or naked man. When she cried, she curled up in a ball on the bed and pounded her fists, her hair got all messed up, and she swore the whole time through her sobs. It was pathetic.

  She ate the last piece of pizza left over from supper and then tidied up the kitchen. Washing her face, she thought about Lewis and Wanda getting ready for bed at their house, still chatting about the show or planning what they would do tomorrow. Brushing her teeth, she thought about the fat pale man and his wife having a last glass of sherry and a bit of ripe cheese while still trying to decode the mysteries of modern art and what should they hang over the new chesterfield (which was, no doubt, crushed velvet or plaid). Sitting on the toilet, she thought about her collages hanging in the empty gallery with the door locked now, the lights off and a few uneaten chunks of cheese curling up on the crystal platters.

  She put on her flannelette nightgown and went to bed.

  She awoke to the sound of the telephone ringing. It rang a dozen times into the dark kitchen. She knew it would be Lewis, calling from their downstairs phone now that Wanda was upstairs asleep.